Dear Diary
Yesterday, walking to the train station in the morning, I watched four staggered balloons rise in to the sky, maybe a quarter mile away and hundreds of yards up. I wondered if some kid had started the day losing their balloons, and it wasn't even 8 a.m. yet.
Half a block later, I look up again, and a raft of balloons, all tied together but shaking like they're trying to separate, has floated up in to the air. Slowly following the four leading balloons.
...
I was working late, waiting for some files to upload to a server so I could shut the computer down and go home, when my boss and a coworker invited me to come meet a job applicant for an editor position.
I went in, got to interrupt the conversation with the noticing of my presence but watch it continue when I didn't say anything. A few more words and I was introduced.
"Nice to meet you," I said. "They haven't been too hard on you, have they?" I asked, referring to my coworkers.
"Nah," he said. "They didn't leave any bruises." He chuckled.
"Ah. Oranges in socks, eh?"
That got an actual laugh from him.
My boss looked confused. "I don't get it," he said.
The interviewee said, "It's kind of old-fashioned. They used to say that if you put oranges in socks and hit someone with them, it would leave bruises."
My boss looked at me, so I said, "It appeared in Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe." I haven't actually read the book, and once I realized that what I was saying made it sound like I had, I continued: "In the film adaptation, John Cusack plays a con man. He gets caught trying a change-related con at a bar, so they beat him up with oranges in sacks."
"Never saw it," my boss said.
Really, neither did I. Just that scene. But the guy who catches Cusack explains to him why he's putting oranges in a bag. It made an impression.
But with that one quick aside, I had made a quick connection with the job applicant over our shared knowledge of an old-fashioned form of violence. I have all sorts of odd stuff in my head.
This knack came in handy earlier this year, when I directed a photo shoot. I had to quickly find some common ground with all my models so we'd have something to talk about, keeping them smiling and enjoying themselves in the hot, oppressive green room we were shooting in. Sometimes it was music, sometimes it was movies. With one person, it was a conversation about the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz. I was able to tell her a bit of trivia, that the movie The Lost Boys opens on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
So there's that.
...
After work, I had quite a few beers with friends. We joked too loudly about inappropriate topics, but we were spending quite a bit, so the people running the coffee shop/internet cafe/Korean restaurant that we were at were quite fond of us.
On the walk home from the train station, I became fascinated with the color and fingernail paring shape of the moon. It was low in the sky and seemed bigger than usual.
But when I fit it in the viewer of my camera, all the magic went out of it.
...
The person who fixes it so we can take photos the size of our entire field of vision will make a fortune.